Hi all, During last NRG meeting some questions are raised on what is the transmembrane pressure in Dean’s chip-in-a-beaker dialysis system and what is the direction of flow of the whole system. i gave them some thought and proposed the following scenario. Please feel free to correct me should I made any mistake. i am simply throwing…
Last week I made a post about the troubles that a toluene-based PEGylation process presents to the PDMS in the CytoVu assembly. It was suggested that this issue might be overcome by replacing toluene with ethanol in the process, but I can report that unless I did something wrong (which is, I suppose, quite possible)…
Invitrogen offers a number of stains and dyes for use in tracking cells and fluorescent imaging of tissue culture. One prevalent live stain is called CMFDA (5-Chloromethylfluorescein Diacetate), a green fluorescent molecular probe. This stain is utilized for tracking cells and monitoring growth & viability of the cells. While performing studies using CMFDA, there appears…
We have had success cross-linking PEG to TEOS membranes pretreated with TPM to aid in adhesion. This was done first on nonporous membranes, and then porous. We used 50% PEG at 1.5% cross-linker, which cross-linked at 8000ms. For comparison, 100% PEG at 3% cross-linker cross-linked at 5500ms. Nonporous TEOS Bottom image is at 4x. The…
I have been looking into PLA (Poly Lactic Acid) plastic for use in our microfluidics. PLA is a commonly used material in 3-d printers, so it would be great if we could print out our microchannels for cell-culture devices. To that end, I wanted to see if the PLA plastic would react with our…
We used 4″ wafers with 40 nm pnc-Si on 50 nm RV SiN (RTP 1050 C, 100 C/s, 60 s). JP ran a series of RIE times from 10 to 50 s with 10 s intervals. (We had initially planned on starting at 70 s based on experiments with 6 ” wafers, but fortunately JP chose…
During the recent visit of Greg Madeijski to our Institute of Biophysics, Imaging & Optical Science (IBIOS) here in Nottingham we had the opportunity to try imaging cultures of cells on several nanoporous membranes, including CytoVu’s and also the unsupported TEM grids without SiN. Here is a short summary of our adventures, along with some…
The following diagram lays out each separate setup that was tested using different combinations of Geltrex and substrates. Each trial has a different reasoning behind why it was done. The purpose of these trials was to investigate the effects of Gelrex gel and PCTE membrane inserts on tube formation in Bend.3 cells. First, we showed…
I have been working on the in-situ heating experiments on the free-standing membranes in the past few weeks. After quit a few times attempts I finally have some good videos made from the TEM images that were taken during the in-situ heating process. First I’ll introduce the background of these two videos including sample info,…
After a false start with non-microporous TEOS chips, I quickly did an image comparison with truly porous chips using polystyrene beads. The TEOS and Silicon Nitride chips were both fabricated in the single-well CytoVu format (single 2 mm window, 5.4mm die size). The TEOS chips allows water and media with serum to much more easily…